IT systems are commonly used in a large number of applications to process data, broadly referring to any operation that may be performed in respect thereto (for example, to collet, create, store, retrieve, manipulate, transmit data). Each IT system generally comprises many IT assets of different types contributing to the IT system's operation (for example, assets of computing machines and software programs).
IT systems may become very complex. A typical example is in cloud computing (or simply cloud) environments, wherein users of a communication network are allowed to exploit computing resources on-demand as services. The (cloud) services are made available by cloud providers, which provision, configure and release the (cloud) resources upon request, so that the actual implementation of the services is completely opaque to the users that have the illusion of an infinite capacity thereof. For this purpose, the cloud providers own large IT systems with IT assets that actually implement the cloud resources with the required level of performance, reliability and security.
Different approaches may be used to measure the complexity of IT systems.
The complexity of the IT systems adversely affects management of the IT systems, for either setup or maintenance over time.
Indeed, the complexity of the IT systems makes it quite difficult for any operation thereon, which increases the starting costs and the operative costs of the IT systems. Moreover, the complexity of the IT systems reduces a quality of service of the IT systems (for example, because of the longer time that may be required to fix any malfunctioning).
The complexity of IT systems also makes it more difficult the application of any changes to the IT systems (for example, because of unpredictable side effects), which hinders (or at least substantially postpones) the adoption of new technologies and solutions. As a result, the performance of the IT systems may degrade over time. Moreover, the maintenance of the IT systems becomes more difficult when its technologies become outdated (with the risk of compromising the operation of the IT system when these technologies become completely obsolete).